It can be pretty hard to hear with the word “terrorism” crammed into your ears.

At least that appears
to be true for many Americans these days, as evidenced by recent poll
results regarding Edward Snowden and his revelations about secret
government spy programs.

The polls show that
most of us think that Snowden — the 29-year-old former National Security
Agency (NSA) contractor who leaked documents to the Guardian newspaper,
exposing the agency’s surveillance programs that monitor our phone
records and email — is guilty of espionage or even treason, and should
be sentenced to prison accordingly.

These same polls also
reveal that the majority of U.S. citizens believe that it’s acceptable
for the government to collect such data on hundreds of millions of us
without warrants or probable cause as long as it uses the information
only to fight terrorism.

But what if that
wasn’t the whole story? What if fighting terrorism were only an
afterthought in the government’s motives behind the creation of the
secret spy programs exposed by Snowden? What would we do if it were
discovered that this massive government intrusion into our private lives
had been going on long before the first plane hit the first Trade
Center tower? These are the questions we should be asking.